California destroys its independent truckers
Jan 12, 2023 09:51:51 #
For pegw - think this one through for yourself. 
This Christmas, remember Tom Odom and all the others whom government regulators have put out of business. No American will escape the ramifications.
On December 27, 1929, Joseph Stalin declared an entire class of farmers, called “kulaks,” a menace to the Soviet revolution. Mass arrests and the collectivization of farmland followed. So, too, did famine. It turned out that removing successful farmers from the economy plunged the USSR into chaos.
California has carried out its own de-kulakization by eliminating the businesses of the state’s estimated 70,000 independent truck drivers. These entrepreneurs own and operate their own trucks, carrying cargo from California ports and manufacturers to the rest of the U.S. The effects on these business owners have been catastrophic. No American will escape the ramifications.
The destruction of independent truckers began when Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5) on September 18, 2019. That law compels independent drivers to surrender the companies they’ve built and seek employment in large firms that can hire them.
When he signed the bill, Newsom genuflected to its stated purpose. AB 5, he said, would stop “workers being wrongly classified as ‘independent contractors,’ rather than employees, which erodes basic worker protections like the minimum wage, paid sick days and health insurance benefits.” But in his signing statement, he said the quiet part out loud: “Assembly Bill 5 is an important step. . . . A next step is creating pathways for more workers to form a union, collectively bargain to earn more, and have a stronger voice at work — all while preserving flexibility and innovation.”
Originally aimed at the Silicon Valley gig economy — at such businesses as Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash — AB 5 was always about enhancing union power. Its author, Lorena Gonzalez, was a San Diego–area Teamsters official when she entered the state assembly in 2013. Upon Newsom’s signing of AB 5, she waxed positively grandiose, declaring that California, “one of the strongest economies in the world, . . . is now setting the global standard for worker protections for other states and countries to follow.”
She resigned in January to take what looked like a payoff for a good and faithful servant: head of the Teamsters-dominated California Federation of Labor.
If herding independent contractors into corporations and concentrating economic power in fewer corporate hands seems inimical to Democrat messaging, consider the real purpose of AB 5: California union leaders use the money from members’ dues to bankroll the campaign of candidates who, like Gonzalez, return the favor by producing laws that grow unions. It is the self-licking ice-cream cone of bureaucracy. That these laws are also k*****g the California economy is a minor point.
The story of truck driver Tom Odom is illustrative. Now a 59-year-old with nearly 40 years of driving behind him, Odom was raised in East Los Angeles, then as now a tough neighborhood.
“We were so poor that I recall my parents were occasionally on welfare,” he says. He dropped out of high school at 16, joined the military at 18, and after a short hitch “bounced around from minimum-wage job to minimum-wage job. I had no education, so what was I going to do? Get a big corporate job?”
When his in-laws asked him to join their family trucking business, he did so “driving team” — industry parlance for driving long distances with a partner. While his father-in-law slept, Odom drove their rig hundreds of miles; while Odom slept, his father-in-law took the wheel and drove hundreds more. “We never stopped,” he says, under conditions that might strike some of us as remarkably close to hell.
But Odom loved it. He tried a brief stint as a full-time employee for a firm that required him to join the Teamsters Union. The experience persuaded him that he’d never work as an employee again. In 1996, with money from savings, he put down $10,000 to purchase two trucks and begin his own independent trucking firm. He loved the flexibility, including the power to accept or reject offers to move cargo for any shipper. He plugged into an organization that provided discounts on insurance, tires and fuel, as well as free trailers, safety oversight, and accounting.
“Here I was, an uneducated kid from East Los Angeles, and now I own my business and I’m making $100,000 per year after expenses,” Odom says. “There’s no way that kid is going to make that kind of money in any other business.”
Then came AB 5, and the end of the road for his business.
Only a few independent truckers are likely to survive AB 5. And other state regulations are likely to finish them off. Regional air-quality boards have declared California’s ports — the largest in the U.S. — off-limits to trucks older than three years. The regulators say that’s necessary to limit emissions from older trucks. It will likely further concentrate market share in large corporations that can afford newer trucks — a remarkable but predictable outcome in a state that protests corporate control of the economy.
Just over the horizon, there was more bad news for truckers. Meeting in October, California’s powerful Air Resources Board said it will pursue a ban on the sale of trucks that run on gasoline or diesel fuel after 2040.
“Obviously we all want cleaner air, but this would be catastrophic to the industry,” Jeff Cox, a veteran truck driver and owner of the Madera-based trucking company Best Drayage, told CalMatters. “We’re operating in an already challenging environment. To add something else that is this drastic would be very harmful.”
The rest is here -
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/california-destroys-its-independent-truckers
This Christmas, remember Tom Odom and all the others whom government regulators have put out of business. No American will escape the ramifications.
On December 27, 1929, Joseph Stalin declared an entire class of farmers, called “kulaks,” a menace to the Soviet revolution. Mass arrests and the collectivization of farmland followed. So, too, did famine. It turned out that removing successful farmers from the economy plunged the USSR into chaos.
California has carried out its own de-kulakization by eliminating the businesses of the state’s estimated 70,000 independent truck drivers. These entrepreneurs own and operate their own trucks, carrying cargo from California ports and manufacturers to the rest of the U.S. The effects on these business owners have been catastrophic. No American will escape the ramifications.
The destruction of independent truckers began when Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5) on September 18, 2019. That law compels independent drivers to surrender the companies they’ve built and seek employment in large firms that can hire them.
When he signed the bill, Newsom genuflected to its stated purpose. AB 5, he said, would stop “workers being wrongly classified as ‘independent contractors,’ rather than employees, which erodes basic worker protections like the minimum wage, paid sick days and health insurance benefits.” But in his signing statement, he said the quiet part out loud: “Assembly Bill 5 is an important step. . . . A next step is creating pathways for more workers to form a union, collectively bargain to earn more, and have a stronger voice at work — all while preserving flexibility and innovation.”
Originally aimed at the Silicon Valley gig economy — at such businesses as Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash — AB 5 was always about enhancing union power. Its author, Lorena Gonzalez, was a San Diego–area Teamsters official when she entered the state assembly in 2013. Upon Newsom’s signing of AB 5, she waxed positively grandiose, declaring that California, “one of the strongest economies in the world, . . . is now setting the global standard for worker protections for other states and countries to follow.”
She resigned in January to take what looked like a payoff for a good and faithful servant: head of the Teamsters-dominated California Federation of Labor.
If herding independent contractors into corporations and concentrating economic power in fewer corporate hands seems inimical to Democrat messaging, consider the real purpose of AB 5: California union leaders use the money from members’ dues to bankroll the campaign of candidates who, like Gonzalez, return the favor by producing laws that grow unions. It is the self-licking ice-cream cone of bureaucracy. That these laws are also k*****g the California economy is a minor point.
The story of truck driver Tom Odom is illustrative. Now a 59-year-old with nearly 40 years of driving behind him, Odom was raised in East Los Angeles, then as now a tough neighborhood.
“We were so poor that I recall my parents were occasionally on welfare,” he says. He dropped out of high school at 16, joined the military at 18, and after a short hitch “bounced around from minimum-wage job to minimum-wage job. I had no education, so what was I going to do? Get a big corporate job?”
When his in-laws asked him to join their family trucking business, he did so “driving team” — industry parlance for driving long distances with a partner. While his father-in-law slept, Odom drove their rig hundreds of miles; while Odom slept, his father-in-law took the wheel and drove hundreds more. “We never stopped,” he says, under conditions that might strike some of us as remarkably close to hell.
But Odom loved it. He tried a brief stint as a full-time employee for a firm that required him to join the Teamsters Union. The experience persuaded him that he’d never work as an employee again. In 1996, with money from savings, he put down $10,000 to purchase two trucks and begin his own independent trucking firm. He loved the flexibility, including the power to accept or reject offers to move cargo for any shipper. He plugged into an organization that provided discounts on insurance, tires and fuel, as well as free trailers, safety oversight, and accounting.
“Here I was, an uneducated kid from East Los Angeles, and now I own my business and I’m making $100,000 per year after expenses,” Odom says. “There’s no way that kid is going to make that kind of money in any other business.”
Then came AB 5, and the end of the road for his business.
Only a few independent truckers are likely to survive AB 5. And other state regulations are likely to finish them off. Regional air-quality boards have declared California’s ports — the largest in the U.S. — off-limits to trucks older than three years. The regulators say that’s necessary to limit emissions from older trucks. It will likely further concentrate market share in large corporations that can afford newer trucks — a remarkable but predictable outcome in a state that protests corporate control of the economy.
Just over the horizon, there was more bad news for truckers. Meeting in October, California’s powerful Air Resources Board said it will pursue a ban on the sale of trucks that run on gasoline or diesel fuel after 2040.
“Obviously we all want cleaner air, but this would be catastrophic to the industry,” Jeff Cox, a veteran truck driver and owner of the Madera-based trucking company Best Drayage, told CalMatters. “We’re operating in an already challenging environment. To add something else that is this drastic would be very harmful.”
The rest is here -
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/california-destroys-its-independent-truckers
Jan 12, 2023 10:01:44 #
Jan 13, 2023 07:46:36 #
Causing a shortage to drive up the value of union truckers a huge source of money for demonrats
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